A Plan to Make the Desert Gush

By John Borrell/Tripoli

Controversy sticks as closely to Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi as the bodyguards who follow him everywhere. In the past it has stalked his political and military moves; now it is tracking him into the desert, where hydrology rather than revolutionary politics has captured his interest. In a scheme, large even by colonel's standards, Libya is gearing up to mine water from beneath the Sahara Desert and pipe it hundreds of miles to the Mediterranean littoral, where there is an increasingly serious water shortage. The program is not only hugely expensive but also controversial. Says Brian Smith of the Institute of Hydrology in Wallingford, England: "The sociological and environmental risks in this undertaking are enormous."

The cost of the project's first phase alone is $3.6 billion, nearly as expensive as the Channel tunnel that will link Britain with Continental Europe. By the time the water pipeline is finished, around the turn of the century, says Dokali Megharief, head of the finance division of the project, "we might be looking at as much as $25 billion."

Eventually, more than 200 million cu. ft. of water a day will gush through the 13-ft.-wide pipes, as much as is carried by a major river. Put another way, the Libyans will be pumping more than twice as much water a day as the present volume of OPEC's daily oil production. Some 2,500 miles of pipeline will stretch from the desert to the coast. The branches serving Tripoli alone will be more than 1,200 miles long, a distance roughly equal to that between Switzerland and Scotland.

The scheme cannot be dismissed as just a pipe dream. Last month Gaddafi opened a plant at Brega, south of Benghazi, where some of the 73-ton pipeline sections will be made. Price Bros. of Dayton, a company that is prevented by U.S. restrictions from operating in Libya, provided most of the technology to build the plant. The main contractor, the Dong-Ah Construction Co. of South Korea, is bringing in 8,000 workers to make and lay the pipes. The project seems to be unaffected by Washington's ban on U.S. exports to Libya or by President Reagan's January Executive Order that forced hundreds of Americans to leave the country. "We are having no problem replacing American technicians," says Megharief.

A more serious threat to the project may be the global slump in oil prices. Libya's oil revenue is expected to total $5 billion this year, down from $22.6 billion in 1980. Gaddafi is forging ahead anyway, paying his bills on time and urging Libyans to make greater and greater sacrifices. "A people that eats imported food cannot be free," he says, as store shelves become increasingly bare because of import reductions ordered to help pay for the project. Special income and sales taxes have been levied on Libyans.

Some 270 wells are being sunk in the Tazerbo and Sarir areas, more than 300 miles south of Benghazi. Plans call for additional wells to be drilled south of Tripoli and for more then half of Libya's 1,100-mile coastline to be linked by the pipeline. Later, irrigation schemes, food-processing plants and factories are to be added.

The water will come from aquifers deep beneath the Sahara, formed 20,000 to 40,000 years ago, when North Africa had a considerably higher rainfall. These vast subterranean water reservoirs were discovered in the 1960s by U.S. geologists searching for oil.

For Libya, the find was as valuable as the discovery of oil. Although the country has a population of only 3.9 million, more than 90% of the people live along the Mediterranean, where increased demand for water for agriculture and industry is taxing local rain-fed wells. Many have become so saline that they are virtually useless for irrigation purposes. Even in Tripoli, Libya's capital, most of the water has an unpleasant salty taste.

The environmental cost of plumbing the desert water reserves may be considerable. Estimates of the amount of fossil water beneath the Sahara vary widely, as do calculations about the rate of replenishment through flash floods, which turn desert wadis into raging torrents. Says Hydrologist Smith: "It is a one-off use of the resource, and only a short-term solution to the problem." Indeed, some scientists say it is impossible to know for sure whether the desert water will flow for 200, 50 or just 20 years.

Libya plans to irrigate nearly half a million acres of land with the water. Although irrigation may initially produce bumper crops, some scientists say persistent intensive irrigation will release salts in the soil, leading to such a high level of salinity that agriculture in the area may be threatened. "Irrigation schemes around the world don't have a good track record," says Tony Debney of the Wallingford institute. In California, he notes, large tracts of land have become barren because of long-term irrigation.

There is also concern that tapping the deep aquifers will cause smaller pockets of water closer to the surface to disappear, along with scattered oases, on which Bedouin tribes depend for survival. "You may completely depopulate a large area of desert and end a way of life that has existed for millenniums," says Debney.

The fact that Gaddafi is willing to take the risk indicates how much Libya needs water. The Libyan government calls the scheme the Great Man-Made River Project, while Gaddafi's critics have dubbed it the Great Madman River. Just who is right is as difficult to predict at this stage as the colonel's next political move.